Your Weekend Sports and A&C Advisory

Tonight's the night for baseball, says our Damon Agnos, as the Mariners lead us into May with a homestand against Oakland:

Related Content

They're hardly titans, but they're not the Titanic either. This year's Seattle Mariners are a mediocre team fortuitously placed in a lousy division, among whose lousy members are the Oakland A's. In three games (tonight through Sunday), the first-place M's will battle the lowly A's to maintain their spot atop the American League West. Sadly, though, the seafarers will be sending out their three lousiest starting pitchers. Why, then, should we watch? First, every game counts in such an evenly matched division. And second, Oakland fans. While they don't show up in their own stadium, they generally show in ours. This fan once saw an overzealous Oakland fan removed from our facility after he broke open a Seattle fan's nose with a head-butt. In the box seats. It takes something special to turn prissy Safeco Field--known for its one-time "Yankees Suck" T-shirt ban--from American grandstand to American Gladiators. So bring your team spirit and your brass knuckles; at least for this weekend, the Terrordome has a retractable roof. Safeco Field, 1250 First Ave S., 346-4001, www.seattlemariners.com. $8-$65. 7:10 p.m. DAMON AGNOS

Keep reading for more weekend arts tips after the jump...

FRIDAY (cont.)

Mark Morris Dance Group

Ballet was codified in France, and the movement vocabulary matches the French language: beautiful, slippery, subtle. The roots of modern dance are American, and Seattle-born Mark Morris uses that idiom to create a kind of schoolyard in the studio. Members of the Mark Morris Dance Group hop and skip and slide on stage. They are superlative versions of the kids we once were, and the choreography recalls playtime from long ago. Yet Morris sets those steps to two classical concertos in his three-year-old colllection Mozart Dances (through Sunday). The piece matches the lyricism and delicacy of the score, played here by the Seattle Symphony with guest pianists Garrick Ohlsson and Yoko Nozaki. But it is fundamentally a dance of human beings, grown-up children, and the games they might play. Also note that for adults over 21, a separate admission ($20) karaoke party immediately follows the performance, with some dancers expected to attend; RSVP recommended. The Paramount, 911 Pine St., 467-5510, www.theparamount.com. $35-$75. 8 p.m. SANDRA KURTZ

The Terminator

Who knew the that the eminent Republican governor of California once worked in the movies? We had no idea. James Cameron made a star of Arnold Schwarzenegger in this tremendously enjoyable and propulsive 1984 action smash, which has spawned two sequels to date and influenced countless movies and video games. (In fact, The Terminator may have been responsible for combining those two industries.) In a masterstroke of casting, the Austrian bodybuilder plays a robot sent back in time to kill mankind's future savior. His overmuscled stiffness and puny command of the English language become the movie's strengths, of course, as Michael Biehn and Linda Hamilton (the chosen mother) battle a hulk that seems unstoppable--except for a telling inability to improvise. (R) Egyptian, 805 E. Pine St., 781-5755, www.landmarktheaters.com. $7-$9.50. 11:59 p.m. BRIAN MILLER

SATURDAY

Chicken Run

"You lay eggs and then you die," sighs Ginger, a chicken whose attempts to flee a prison-like English poultry farm in Chicken Run (2000) amusingly resemble scenes from various World War II escape movies. Enter Rocky (voiced by the pre-crazy Mel Gibson), a macho American circus rooster who literally falls from the sky. The British birds think Rocky can fly and demand lessons, while he buys time smooth-talking the hens. It's a charming story, but the real reason to see the first feature by Peter Lord and Nick Park (of Aardman Animations, creators of Wallace and Gromit) is its technical wizardry. The stop-motion claymation is so fluid you'd swear it was computer animation, and some of the stunts are like classic Indiana Jones. (The G-rated movie is presented by SIFF's ongoing Films4Families series.) SIFF Cinema, 321 Mercer St. (McCaw Hall), 448-2186, www.siff.net. $2-$7. 10 a.m. SOYON IM

Ladytron

Electropop quartet Ladytron caught the attention of pretentious scenesters and drunken clubbers alike with its first two albums, 604 and Light & Magic. The Brit-band has since developed an enormous cult following, thanks to several underground hits and extensive touring. Its latest release, 2008's Velocifero, is a sexy Goth-tinged dance album filled with hypnotic melodies, raucous beats, and wry song content (sung in both English and Bulgarian). Lead vocalists Helen Marnie and Mira Aroyo deadpan and taunt their way through lyrics like, "There's a ghost in me who wants to say, 'I'm sorry,' doesn't mean I'm sorry." Their chilly delivery is simultaneously gorgeous and disturbing, leaving you torn between wanting to dance and run for cover. Omaha's dance-punk band The Faint opens. Showbox SoDo, 1700 First Ave. S., 652-0444, www.showboxonline.com. $22.50-$25 (all ages). 8 p.m. ERIKA HOBART

SUNDAY

Ann Lislegaard

The three computer-animation installations and accompanying three sound rooms by Danish artist Ann Lislegaard are presented as 2062, the year in which they might've been created. That future date reflects her inspiration from sci-fi writers Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, and the just-deceased J.G. Ballard. Each of the looped videos is based on one of their stories; but it would be a mistake to think of them as direct adaptations. Instead, as in the case of the black-and-white triptych Left Hand of Darkness (from Le Guin's 1969 novel), swirling iconography orbits the source text. Medical illustrations of our sex organs, snowshoes, sleds, and skis spin in a flurry. A dancer practices in another panel. Paragraphs from Le Guin appear in blurry overlay, unreadable. Do you need to know that in the novel an emissary visits a cold, wintry planet whose inhabitants change sex? Not really. Lislegaard only obliquely references these underlying stories. ("I'm not so interested in fantasy," she curtly noted during a walk-through.) Her literary sources are excerpted in a few words or phrases that you hear or read while pacing between the three stations in the big, dark gallery. Pessimism rules the room. Over at Crystal World (based on Ballard), we read, "Memories have faded...progress becomes pointless...more and more, time leaks away." There's something Tron-ish about these forbidding animations; they're cool, empty, sad--future worlds we wouldn't want to inhabit, but may inherit. (Through Aug. 23.) Henry Art Gallery, 15th Ave. N.E. & N.E. 41st St., 543-2280, www.henryart.org. $6-$10. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. BRIAN MILLER

Carrie

Talk about a powerful combination of ingredients: the source novel by Stephen King; Brian De Palma as director; Sissy Spacek as telekinetic teen heroine; and Piper Laurie as her mother, possibly a witch. And did we mention Amy Irving and John Travolta as the prom queen and king? One of the great films about high school, the 1976 Carrie turns adolescence into literal horror. Spacek is the meek doormat subject to a cruel social prank by the popular kids at school. They see her as an easy victim. And at first she, too, shares that self-estimation. She's terrified of menstrual blood, terrified of her mother, yet possessed of secret powers--just as every teen feels herself or himself to be. The cycle of bullying, victimhood, and revenge still resonates in our post-Columbine era. Only Carrie doesn't need automatic weapons to strike back at her tormentors. (R) Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, www.central-cinema.com. $6. 7 & 9:30 p.m. BRIAN MILLER